Board Considers Security Issues

The Wylie school board heard security recommendations from Abilene Police Chief (and Wylie parent) Stan Standridge during its recent school board meeting, as the district continues efforts to make sure its students are as safe as possible.

Standridge told the district it had three options when it comes to having an armed presence on campus.

The first is to add resource officers (policemen who work for the district and are paid partly by the schools and partly by the police department.)

Wylie already has a resource officer, Brent Irby, at Wylie High School.

"Brent does a fantastic job, but you have more than one campus," Standridge said.

He said the police department does not have enough manpower to devote another police officer to Wylie until the next class of recruits is trained. He estimated that would be the start of the 2015-16 school year.

The second option is to train a school employee as a school marshal. The Texas School Marshal Program was passed by the Texas Legislature in 2013 and includes an extensive training curriculum that Standridge has helped develop.

He said a school marshal must be an employee, must have a concealed handgun license, must take a psychological evaluation and must go through 80 hours of training, plus continuing education.

"I think the school marshal program has a lot of benefits," Standridge said.

The third option is called the guardian plan, and it allows the district to designate an employee who already has a concealed handgun license to carry that weapon on campus.

"Personally, I don't think the guardian plan is what you should consider," Standridge told the board. "They only have 10 hours of training."

A guardian also cannot carry the weapon into school sporting events, he said.

Since the shooting at Newtown, Conn., last year, the Wylie school district has been studying its security and ways to make sure that students are safe.

Standridge said he recommends that the district have an employee trained as a school marshal. The training costs about $1,000.

Parents, students and other teachers would not know who the marshal is.

Standridge applauded the district for looking at various options for school safety.

"I think you absolutely need to have this discussion," he said.

Standridge said that 110 shooting events occurred between 2000 and 2012, and 35 percent of those occurred on school campuses. That was second only to work places, where 37 percent occur.

He said 51 percent of the time, the incident is ongoing when police arrive, and the average response time was 3 minutes.

However, because of Wylie's location on the outskirts of town, Standridge said he estimated that it would take at least 7 minutes for Abilene police to respond if an incident occurred at a Wylie school.

He suggested that Wylie add a school marshal in the upcoming year and then another resource officer in 2015. Those two, along with Irby, would give the district three armed security personnel to help better cover the six campuses.

The school board planned to discuss the issue in more detail at a special board planning session this past Wednesday.